The basics of basic training

Jane Chastain is a Southern California-based broadcaster, author and political commentator. Despite her present emphasis on politics, Jane always will be remembered as the nation's first female TV sportscaster, spending 17 years on the sports beat. Jane blogs at JaneChastain.com. She is a pilot who lives on a private runway.

On March 17, the Commission on Military Training and Gender-Related
Issues reported to Congress that “the services are providing the
soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines required by the operating forces
to carry out their assigned missions; therefore, each service should be
allowed to continue to conduct basic training in accordance with its
current policies.” This was more than an endorsement of the status quo.
It was a whitewash of the many problems created by housing and training
male and female recruits together.

This commission was created by the House Armed Services Personnel
Subcommittee two years ago in order to buy time and to avoid confronting
the Clinton Administration, which has operated on the misguided
principle that men and women are interchangeable fungibles and the
military is simply a playground for social experiments and the
advancement of feminist ideology.

Common sense and history has shown that putting women in fighting
units is a prescription for disaster. Likewise, common sense and history
has shown that putting young men and women together in basic training
reduces readiness and the sexual tension created by housing and training
these young recruits together creates problems that the military can ill
afford.

One at least can understand why Chairman Steve Buyer and many of the
other male members of his committee wanted to bend over backwards to
accommodate the attractive, vocal Jane Harman, who was a dominant
liberal presence on that subcommittee at the time. It was much easier to
create yet another taxpayer-funded, time wasting commission than it was
to tackle, head on, the problems created by mixed-gender basic training.
But why, oh why, did Buyer allow the committee to be stacked with
feminist ideologues like Barbara Pope, Mady Wechsler Segal and Frederick
Pang who, as Pentagon officials or consultants, helped to create this
misguided policy in the first place?

The report turned in by this group was predictable and it proves only
one thing: When you put a left-leaning panel together, you are going to
get biased policy recommendations that aren’t worth the paper they are
written on.

Well, a funny thing happened between the creation of this panel and
the delivery of its pitiful epistle. A bipartisan committee appointed by
Defense Secretary William Cohen and headed by Sen. Nancy Kassebaum Baker
studied the issue and voted unanimously, 11-0, to return the military to
gender segregated basic training. The report from the Kassebaum Baker
Committee was based on facts, not fiction, and should be allowed to
stand.